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Anything with a timer is a hard pass for me. Spirit eater, timer to respond in Alpha Protocal, etc... I want to brainlessly farm every question mark on the map and be ridiculously overpowered by chapter end.

After deadlines at work, deal with deadlines in game

Ok slackers, I bought Blood of the Dawn Walker and started playing it. I'm just about done with the prologue, although I restarted, so I've clocked about 5 hours in. The story is very good. Interesting characters, good setting, great villains, and engaging quests just in the prologue. It plays a lot like the Witcher series, except the main character isn't a moody bitch like Geralt. It's a solid RPG. The timed quests are interesting. Nothing so far is timed, but you have limited slots of time to use on quests throughout the day (and I'd guess night.) That means you can't do everything, but you have as much time as you want to complete the quests you choose to do. So you have choices to make and it is reactive with consequences. In the prologue I had to make some tough choices that then played out in the story. I'm liking it so far and it is clearly designed for replayability.

Zero Company is fantastic. I played about 10 hours yesterday, which I probably haven't done with a game since Xcom 2 came out. It runs well on my very mid computer. It does struggle a bit, but not in places where it matters (ie movies and qte stutter a bit, but gameplay is fine.) I only have 16gb of ram. If you liked the Clone Wars series, this is basically the game for you. It really digs into the lore of the animated shows. It feels like Bad Batch. The characters in your crew are all pretty interesting and you have a lot of customization options. It is still very story-centric, so that hurts the replay value a bit, but I am pretty sure I will still get at least a couple playthroughs out of it. Just doing a male and female Hawk alone is different enough. You can recruit a bunch of randos and ignore the main companions as well. It's probably still more Chimera Squad than Xcom 2, but it has more depth than the former. Combat is fun. I started on normal and it is a bit easy, but I can see it getting harder as I move away from fighting droids. Like the show, droids are comically bad.

Finished Dawnwalker. I was happy with my ending. I did run out of time on some stuff that I wanted to do, but I was also ready to finish the game after sinking 45 hours into it. I really enjoyed the story and Lacra is my new girlfriend. She would never admit it, of course, but she is clearly sweet on me. Post credits scene was cool. Honestly I'm just glad to know the game did well and I look forward to future games. I've had a great month of gaming with this and Zero Company. I don't finish a lot of games, so finishing two in a month is a surprise. They were both fantastic.

Also finished Zero Company. I am somewhere in the middle on it. The gameplay is good enough and the story, while better than XCOM, is still bellow KOTOR for me. But to be fair, while I like Star Wars, I am not part of the Star Wars cult. The game definitely picks up as it goes and that keeps you engaged and in that aspect is much better than XCOM which is kind of flat in that regard. The characters are likable. What I don't like is that they overly forced the cinematic aspect of the game. Wrong game format for that in my opinion. At 32 hours (for a full playthrough) it's not a long game, but then again if it was much longer with no expansion of gameplay along the way I think it would have overstayed its welcome. I recommend it at a discount, especially because it can do with some more patching.

Stalker 2 is pretty good now with the expansion installed and the engine upgrade. I made it 2/3 through. It's a very long game so that's not really a detraction. the DLC has much better traditional single player level design, and also a fair amount of shoehorning, as you would expect. It kinda looks and feels like a real game now as opposed to a weekend project or steam greenlight thing.

I replayed Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters with both DLC. The game has changed/improved a lot since release. More mission types. More classes. More events. Far better experience and the assassins add interesting ways to take on different missions.

Drova. Started the game, got to the first settlement (camp; spent a few short gaming sessions cutting the treants in the woods, 5 minutes per treant), got through a random cave to some ruins, grabbed a big axe while dodging the harpies. Could not use the axe - it required 74 skill points spent and I had 28. On a more serious note, the system requirements, controls, and the saving system are very appealing and the gameplay somewhat reminds of Gothic but better and with a custom PC.

I finally finished my first run through Black Geyser. Overall, the game was very good and I enjoyed plaing it very much. It is definitely an old-school cRPG in every way. But, the fact that it was a low-budget crowd-funded game does show. The writing needed more work (not just the quality of the writing but also such things as dialogue branching and reactivity), and the area levels were often too simple, small, and repetitive. The main quest was okay, but I liked many of the side quests more, including especially the companion quests which had multiple parts to them. The companions themselves were a mixed bag; some were really interesting and well-written while others were obviously thrown in at the last minute. The good news is the that the developers are very good about accepting and listening to player/fan feedback. There were a couple of side quests where bugs were preventing me from completing them. After I used their built-in bug reporting system, they very quickly got back to me with solutions. Then, I used their correspondence with me to send back to them a lot of my constructive feedback about the game, to which they were very enthusiastically receptive. Their devs are even active in posting on the game's Steam forum! So, I have high expectations and a lot of excitement now for their next game, Avaria. ************************ I also finished my most recent attempt at playing Humankind. This time I was able to go all the way into the fourth of the five eras of the game before I finally quit. I play this (and other similar) strategy/4X games as sandbox games where I find ways to turn off the war/conquest part of the game. I build my empire and the AI builds its empire and we both stay clear of each other. This worked great in Humankind and the game remained interesting to me right up until I finally entered the industrial era. At that point, the game started to drag and become tedious and repetitive, and also somewhat frustrating (esp. the pollution mechanic), and so I decided I had got my money's worth from the game and I quit. ************************* Now I've begun my first playthrough of Dark Envoy (from the makers of Tower of Time from several years ago). So far so good, but clearly only because I'm playing on the Easy difficulty setting (there is a Story setting below this). It is very clearly an ARPG rather than a cRPG, and often-times even more a dungeon-crawler. It's lots and lots of combat encounters one after another, but at least on Easy I am able to get through them pretty quickly and without taking too much damage. I am even able to use their AI to control some of my party members while I only manage my casters. Works pretty well. The story has been very interesting so far, and I continue to like its steampunk setting with its mix of high-magic and advanced technology.

I played through the whole of Rouge trader, with DLC. It's not bad. 8/10 on a good day. I wish I had more options in this genre.

Drova Primeval Forest Somehow, my favoured weapon type is axe now and I usually go with swords or daggers. Tried Blackshard and Hypnos demos. They ran poorly.

I can live with action timers, but everything else just makes my brain hurt trying to come up with the best way to cram as much into the game as possible. So, yeah, no. Thanks, but no thanks. Keep your nasty timers. I'll go do every sidequest in Amn and then go looking for Imoen. Bye!

https://www.thebeaverton.com/2026/09/canada-confirms-defence-strategy-against-invasion-mainly-waiting-for-americans-to-die-from-preventable-illnesses/

Family outing. Free beer and shots. Not so great mood with work and private stuff. Equates drunk. Very. Probability of regret tomorrow: high. For now? Feeling pretty good.

Started playing Turok 3. Man, this not your traditional Turok but oh boy did I enjoy it. A short 3 to 4 hour experience that screams of the late 90s fps games. :p

I think this is the most likely scenario, and not just the worst case. And that is exactly the problem for me, because there are no Bethesda IPs that have any interest for me even though they may be popular with the masses. Between Bethesda and Obsidian, the PoE/Avowed IP is the best IP by a very wide margin, IMO. But we are never going to see another game in that IP, which is why I'm so sad to receive this news.

See right there, that's my problem. In many games, including BG3, I end up liking the side/companion quests way more than the main questline. So, I want to do as many of those as I can. But the devs of this game are explicitly saying they want to limit how many side quests you do in any one playthrough because replayability. And that doesn't sit well with me because I usually just don't have the time to play games that much and so don't replay games that much, especially because my one playthrough tends to be a comprehensive and slow/take my own cool time playing the game playthrough. And this game is exactly the kind of game that I will surely pass on replaying. FYI, my one and only playthrough of BG3 took me 557 hours. So, it's hard to imagine going back to that game again, at least not anytime soon.

It sounds like you don't really need to remove the time because you an get through most of the content in the 30 days. I'm feeling a bit of pressure. I'm level 22, around Day 13, and I've only killed one of the court. But I'm doing a ton of different side quests and they are all extremely interesting. The day/night mechanic is really keeping me jumping around too, since so many quests are tied to it. I know games using certain times for quests aren't new, but Dawnwalker does a great job of it. It feels very different playing at night versus day. Also Coen is possibly my favorite protagonist in a game in a long time. I'm excited to see what the developer does with him next.

Star Citizen ?

I finished Zero Company. It was a blast. If you enjoyed Clone Wars or Bad Batch, you are doing yourself a disservice by not playing this game. It is a perfect part of that corner of the Star Wars universe. It was a really good Star Wars game with very little Jedi and Sith stuff. So yeah, story and characters hit on all notes. Gameplay wise it was a more developed version of Chimera Squad. Not enough people played that game, so I'm not sure if that helps. It wasn't quite Xcom, with smaller maps and a more limited cast of soldiers, but it still had a pretty rewarding tactical combat experience. The game is really setup for a longer mode, a la Long War. There isn't really a reason the game has to end after a certain amount of cycles. You could keep doing missions, running intel, and developing your mercs for years if the game would let you. The systems are all there. I didn't even touch the black market or recruiting screen. So hopefully this games gets some post launch additions, despite the alarming furlough stuff, because everything is in place for it. Running a full droid squad, or Mandos, or Clones is definitely an option. The story kind of gets in the way of the decent strategy engine. Hopefully modders will take to it.

I actually really prefer this over the way Bethesda RPG's give you what seems like an urgent quest, and then expect you to do a bunch of silly sidequests instead. Your kid has been kidnapped! But first you should clean some radroaches out of a basement. No rush. Dawnwalker is very clear about how much time you have, but also why you can't just rush off and save your family. So far all of the quests have been somewhat tied to the main story. Your spending your 30 days trying to weaken the bad guys, gain allies, and get strong enough to not get murdered right away. But yeah, there is some choice and consequences to how you use your time. We are used to C&C through conversations in RPG's, but this is just a different system. Sure, I wanted to help that lady rebury her kid, but I also needed to get some medicine to my mom before it got dark. It's an interesting system. I'm level 15 and I think I'm close to challenging the first minor boss guy. I prefer the daylight and witchcraft system, so I tend to use all my skill points at night, which shortens that part of the game. We will see if that bites me in the rear down the road. Witchcraft is pretty awesome. Blood boiling is terrifying.

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There are much better pictures here, but they changed how the book is embossed because they had lots of returns from people who were not happy how the foil and embossing were uneven. The original version had the leather pattern raised wherever there was foil, now the foil is flat.

Thanks! I added it to my wishlist, and have been reading through some of the discussion on the Steam forum and watching some youtube videos. Alongside the timer issue, the combat seems to be the other major concern for people. But if I can make it meaningfully easier on me through the game's difficulty settings, then that will make a difference in whether I buy the game or not. Btw, the boss I was talking about is named Xanthe. Apparently, you don't necessarily need to fight her, and can instead befriend her. So, there is that. But if you end up fighting her, please share details on that encounter.

There is an easy mode and I am currently playing it. Combat is complicated, with a bunch of different directions to block and attack. I don't love it. Easy mode seems to simplify it a bit. I can just block and attack. I'm only about 5 hours in though, so I don't know if it will get harder or boring. So far it hasn't been combat heavy. Lots of exploring and investigating.

Ever since I played Shogun Showdown, I've been looking for minimalist and addictive puzzle games: Mars Power Industries: Your goal is to connect colonization modules to electricity and other resources by placing energy nodes. You only have a limited number of nodes that you can use in a specific order, and you have to deal with constraints and mechanics like wind, shifting terrain, or obstacles. There are around 80 short puzzles, perfect for relaxing while giving your brain a workout. Golf Peaks: On a grid, you need to get your ball into the hole using various movement cards (move 2 squares forward, jump over an obstacle, etc.). It's all about chaining the right actions to successfully sink the ball. The game keeps things fresh across 10 worlds of 12 levels each, featuring different types of terrain with their own unique characteristics, rugged landscapes, various obstacles, trampolines, and conveyor belts. Like Mars Power Industries, it's a small, relaxing game. Shift of pace: Zero Sievert is a top-down extraction shooter heavily inspired by Escape from Tarkov (though I've never played it) and, more importantly, by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. You immediately recognize that gritty, post-apocalyptic Soviet atmosphere complete with lethal anomalies, radioactive zones, and mutated creatures. You’re tasked with exploring different biomes, scavenging for gear, taking down anything in your path, and completing NPC quests, all while managing your hunger, thirst, radiation levels, inventory space, and equipment condition before racing back to your bunker via an extraction point. Each successful run earns you experience points to unlock various perks over time. The materials you collect let you upgrade your equipment but also your bunker, like expanding your stash capacity etc.. Each area is procedurally generated, meaning extraction points shift locations and various landmarks are scattered across a brand-new map every time you deploy. All in all, it's a tense, deeply addictive loop that keeps you saying "just one more raid." And I've also played Forza Horizon 4 and TF2.

Well, I finished S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Cost of Hope, so yeah... Couple of notes on 2.0 before I dive into the DLC conclusion: loading times for me got significantly longer (at least on Linux), and the incessant shader precompilation on startup had like a 50% change of requiring me to alt+f4 out of it. There's a way to disable it by adding an "Engine.ini" file, but the game kept erasing it so I had to make it read-only. Haven´t noticed any ill effects of getting rid of that precompilation, but that was annoying to have to deal with nevertheless. The final "main" DLC mission had a boss fight that was surprisingly appropriate (rather curious, and slightly worried, how the other branch will fare in that respect). The mission itself was OK in the scope of what S2 missions are like. So that left me on a relatively positive impression. Most of the other new side missions were good, except, unfortunately, the one I mentioned I was enjoying and looking forward to where it went: the one related to the new arch anomaly. The final part of that mission made me want to break my keyboard, and it really dragged down the whole experience for me. So I'll try to get into why without spoiling the storyline, but obviously I have to talk about mechanics and some of the things happening in the quest. If you want to find out the hard way, skip the spoiler bit. "The Forgotten"-mission spoilers So yeah, after that bull**** I was about ready to give the DLC a failing grade, that quest really, really ruined it for me. But I let it sit for a bit and while I do not intend to ever even attempt that mission again legitimately unless they make some significant changes the rest of the DLC was decent enough. One additional note is that after removing the CNPP anomaly and dealing with the faction stuff the whole CNPP area became pretty...lifeless. At least with my chosen faction during exploration I rarely ran into anything alive (and hostile), so that was a bit of a downer. Another niggle with exploration is that there is a rather large area where you will get incessantly attacked by Flame Poltergeists that are situated out of bounds (since these guys don't need to be able to see you to attack you...) so you can´t get rid of them legitimately (and they will just respawn if you get rid of the illegitimately, not that I would know...) I was debating a slightly higher score than I ended up with on in the end I have concerns about replayability. I don´t know whether I'd really want to play through the DLC missions more than twice (to see both sides). The extra areas (arguably, only the CNPP as you can access most of the Iron Forest without completing the DLC story), or the unique weapons don't seem like a compelling enough reason to run through the story missions again (and while I ranted mostly about The Forgotten, the main chain also contains a few missions that I'm not confident I would really enjoy doing again and again) tl;dr the DLC improves on the base game storytelling wise, but is really dragged down by other aspects that either do not improve on the base game (like mission design), or double down on things that were not great in the base game to begin with, like the excessive amount of platforming and the mutant design. Given that, for me, replayability of the DLC content is a concern I'd rate it at a 5/10, "decent".

Wasn't even aware that it was out. Then again never liked Witcher either. Control 2 is what I'm hyped for.

CNBCTrump tells Fed to slash rates or he'll end trade with co...President Donald Trump demanded that the Fed slash interest rates or else he will cut off trade with countries with which the U.S. maintains trade deficits.

Once upon a long long time ago, I was ships company on the Lincoln. Thailand is good times!

I'm on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2's final main DLC quest and really don't know how I feel about the DLC itself yet. Just to reiterate patch 2.0 was a very marked improvement to the game, but you do not need the DLC to experience those improvements so I consider them separately, this post will be about the DLC content specificallly. The good: the DLC areas were neat, being able to finally explore the Iron Forest and the CNPP freely is fantastic. The new weapons are good (though "locking" some of the unique ARs to a red-dot is...a choice). When it comes to the missions, there's the main mission, and then there's a bunch of new side missions. The main DLC missions, at best I found them to be "eh", at worst I actively loathe them. They're really more of the same from the base game, but dialed up to 11, which is the problem, at least in my book. But if that was your cup of tea, well, there's more of it. If, on the other hand, you were hoping they'd go back to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-style mission design where you are given an objective and then there's different ways to approach it...well, this does not appear to be that kind of game, unfortunately. Everything is on rails, even the labs in SoC arguably gave you more freedom to accomplish your goals than S2 does in its story missions. The missions have tons of platforming, magically locking/unlocking doors to force head-on engagements, create boss arenas, and/or lock you into sections of the mission (and then usually making those permanently inaccessible after the mission). Then there's the usual nonsensical "action" cut-scenes (please just ditch those if there ever is a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 3), and finally they throw so much loot at you that inventory management becomes more of a problem than the actual enemies (in one of the missions I picked up over 100 bandages(!)). I swear they are just trying to make fun of us loot goblins by actively giving you gear at the start of missions. The story forces a faction choice, as I feared. As a certified Loner I am absolutely not a fan of these choices, not in the least because the choices in this game tend to negatively impact exploration, my favourite part of the game, by making bases inaccessible (which is also why in this play-through I avoid the mission unlocking Pripyat, getting there through other means). So far it does not appear to have any negative consequences to my standings, though I have heard that picking the other side, does, or maybe it is bugged. Will probably dig more into the DLC storyline when I get through all of it. The side missions, have been a bit of a mixed bag. A few were literally just going somewhere and then talking to someone, though I guess you could start a fight if you really wanted to. The one involving the new anomaly seems pretty cool so far, but it feels as if progress is gated by completion of the DLC's main story, so more on that one later. Stability has been good for me in general, though I had a single CTD in the penultimate DLC mission.

Zero Company is much more cinematic, so the story should be better. Performance is palatable. It's not good, but it's playable, especially considering that I am using the highest settings and native resolution. I'm still early on in the game (or at least I think I am) so I'm reserving judgment. Oh and I found out you can change the action wheel in the game settings.

GTAVI seems pointless when Drump's Amerika exists. It should've released a decade ago. Drump's Amerika even beats Saints Row 3/4.

I played Plague Tale Innocence which is an action adventure game set in 14th century France, it also has several necessary stealth mechanics. Its basically about a brother and sister who travel plague ravaged France trying to escape the Inquisition, find a cure for the brother and then free there mother. Its fun and has some good moments. Every map has 2-3 ways you can progress around defeating soldiers or avoiding them and you always find enough resources to use a certain skill or weapon. Its short, 20 hours but worthwhile It gets a 63\100 on the " BruceVC game rating system " Now Im playing GTA5 again in anticipation of the eventual PC release of GTA6. But this time Im using about 20 mods that just improve the overall mechanics of the vanilla game and visuals. So for example I added a search mod for dead bodies and car dealership so I can sell any stolen cars. I initially downloaded the enhanced version but realized it doesn't support many of the mods I wanted so I downloaded the legacy version and modding this game is extremely easy. You just have to drag an .ovI file into the mod manager called OpenVI and it configures everything for you or you copy a few files into install folder. Thats it Its really fun, the humor and memes around US society and culture always make me laugh. The radio stations are the most hilarious and I like playing the different characters because they all have unique missions and NPCs they interact with. The missions, activities and NPC are varied and memorable so I always have lots I want to do Its early days and Im 20 hours into it but having a blast

Set up a VPS so I can hang out on IRC

Currently working on designing and finalising a 12-month practicum for leadership training ...

7 Days to Die: --loot bags only ... a few/several plays later. "Well, that cycle is played out/change of pace needed." --back to "normal" gameplay ... "Dangit, it now feels super easy/dull. What else can I do re: attrition starts." EMPTY MAP. No towns/cities/wilderness POI's, no Traders, no roads, etc. Just biome terrain, occasional trash bags around, trees/terrain, max zombies. GO! ---Several hours later ... "Well that was fun." Tough start, but eventually had a base, all workstations, etc. But a little dull long run with zero POI's to even redeco etc. Not even rubble POI's spawn. EDIT THE map generator .xml ! ---teeny teeny tiny towns, only one to a biome (this is mostly to make the game create some roads/spawn a few Traders), mostly empty space. Still severe self-rules. Go!

All of the GTA games are 3rd person. You could give GTA V a try.

It is a fact that Playa in Saint's Row 4 was the best president of the USA. They were not responsible for Zinyak destroying the earth and handled it better than any other head of state would have.

buh, i have to amend this. it's not just as simple as a quick-load. i definitely was surprised to run into this drug duration issue again, despite definitively not using quick-load. i wasn't able to figure out specific pattern between quick-saves, quick-loads, normal saves, normal loads, in my earlier test i did a lot of tests between the two and only with normal loads did game state get restored, however last night i ran into the issue and no matter what i did i got strange outcomes. i think it's still worth being conservative and avoiding quick-loads, but i suspect there's something about game state that is managed outside a specific session, that can get persisted through saves and loads or not, which is very weird to think about. but i can't deduce a pattern anymore.

Just waiting on Zero Company to unlock...

Really like Menace, it has its flaws but the gameplay is very good and the variety is outstanding. Story is just there as a flavor, but it doesn't detract from the game. The only knock against it is that it's on the harder side to get in to, the tutorial is non existent and some gameplay things are not obvious. For an example, I upgraded a section of my ship and I though that I could upgrade the whole tree in that module, turns out that you can only pick one branch and there is no warning to say, hey you will destroy the previous upgrade and lose all the resources you used on that upgrade. By the time I figured that out, I already lost the save and even if I hadn't I wouldn't have wanted to reply that much. The game is still in EA so stuff may improve, but so far it's good.

@marelooke and @majestic This is so serendipitous, we were just talking about SOMA and I went to Steam today to check it again and its on 80% discount !!! It was fate telling me to buy it.....and I did 🥳

@rjshae What do you think, is this something they not teaching you in school about US history...she did say people must just research like she did? 😱

I’d like to suggest adding a separate button or option to view and browse water building pieces while on land. Currently, it’s inconvenient that you have to enter the water just to see what water structures are available. It would make planning builds much easier.

SOMA is fantastic, enjoy! Right, got some hands-on time with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 DLC and Patch 2.0 now, so here's some initial thoughts. The Zone itself feels much better, things in general look a lot more realistic and the areas look less samey. The biggest improvement by far is the lighting, you don't need a Flashlight in the weirdest situations anymore. Spawns also seem to be somewhat improved, at least I haven´t had enemies spawn on top of me anymore and the tendency of the game to just drop encounters on you on a timer also seems to have been toned down a little bit (but it is still very much there). They also tweaked some values so radiation started affecting me again, while before the patch I was pretty much immune to all but the "you shall not pass"-instakill radation, so that is nice. There's some new variants of existing mutants, not really sure what is different aside from their colour. Most of them still have all the problems they had before. Mutant design in general in this instalment is, imho, poor, and the 2.0 patch doesn't appear to have done anything to address this (not that I really expected it to) The DLC (so far) itself feels a much more coherent story-wise than the base game, so that's a big improvement. It does seem to focus on, or at least heavily involve, the Duty vs Freedom rivalry. I've personally never cared much for the relationships between the various factions, at least not any further than "is hostile/is friendly" and the whole "faction war" shtick from Clear Sky is something I absolutely did not care for at all, but ymmv. At least the people you meet are likeable, and as long as I won't be forced to pick a side it is "whatever" as they say. The boss fights (or the fact that there are any at all, really) still really suck and I really wish they'd just get rid of them entirely. They are just not fun and horribly immersion breaking. There's some fun new anomalies in the DLC, but I'm not sure if any of them pop up outside of the new areas, but so far I have not seen them outside of the new areas. The game is probably close to where it should have been on launch at this point. I would still recommend people new to the series play the originals first though (at least SoC and CoP) because I really think they ruined the impact of mutants in this one. In more general terms I'd say the game now qualifies as "good" in my book, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-enjoyers that have been holding off on getting it may want to consider jumping in at this point.